With the increasing consciousness of health and greater importance attached to shape-up, dieting, and so on in recent years, the sporting population devoted to jogging, cycling, mountain climbing, and so on is on the steady increase and a variety of food compositions designed to supply energy in such physical exercises and permit an easy and convenient intake of high-quality protein for increased muscle mass and shape-up are being explored and developed.
The inventors of the present invention also did much research for the purpose of providing a food composition adapted to supply nutrients on the occasion of such sport activities and previously succeeded in developing a high-protein, high-viscosity nutritional food composition suited for the purpose (Japanese Examined Patent Publication No. 102112/1995). This composition is not only useful for feeding in sport activities but also can be taken easily and conveniently even by hospitalized patients on the bed during the postoperative period of convalescence or in the recovery stage of liver and kidney diseases, for instance, but it is not sufficiently effective in lowering the human body fat mass or improving the chemical composition of the body.
The object of the present invention, therefore, is to provide a novel food composition capable of lowering the body fat percentage and improving the body composition and a methodology for judicious ingestion of the food composition.
With the above object in mind, the inventors of the present invention did further research and discovered surprisingly that ingestion of a defined food, such as the above food composition, according to a predetermined time schedule associated with physical exercises can increase muscle mass and decrease fat mass leading to an improvement in body composition. The present invention has been developed on the basis of the above finding.